the city afforded, pulled cloaks high around their necks and hastened along cobblestone streets toward their beds. Here and there, throughout the mile-square city, a snarl or growl erupted as someone wandered too close to someone else’s guarded property.
Silhouetted sentries from the templarate’s civil bureau, their spears against one shoulder and shields hung on the off-weapon arm, patrolled the broad outer rampart walls. The damage wrought seven years earlier when Rikus of Tyr had led his ragtag gladiator army in doomed assault on Urik’s heart had been long since repaired and blended seamlessly now with the older fortifications.
Better-equipped guards from the templarate war bureau stood watch along the narrower inner walls that divided Urik into segregated quarters, reserved for the nobles and the templars themselves, and common quarters for the rabble. Merchants, who held themselves apart from the entanglements and protection of citizenship, set aside their sunlight rivalries to mount a common watch in their own quarter. In the elven market, near the western gate, where trade never came to a complete stop, pungent fires crackled all night between translucent tents and shanties.
When the curfew gongs rang at midnight, law-abiding folk latched and double-latched their doors, if they had doors. Despite the loud claims of the civil bureaus that the streets of Urik were always safe, regardless of the hour, wise folk knew that after midnight Urik belonged to the street scum who were always responsible for their own safety, and to the templars who, in the opinion of many of those behind latched doors, were the worst of scum themselves.
Despite the curfew, or because of it, there were places within Urik that were only alive in the criminal hours after midnight. One such place was Joat’s Den. Carved out of a corner of the hulking customhouse, convenient to both the Caravan Gate’s plaza and the elven market, but not part of either quarter, the Den sprawled low to the ground and open to the sky.
A single grease-lamp above the door shone faintly on a cracked and peeling piece of leather that, in the bright sunlight, displayed the faded portrait of a gap-toothed dwarf brandishing a tankard: Joat himself in his younger days, when he’d been trying to attract customers.
The customers Joat got, then and now, were off-duty templars. And since the yellow-robes provided a steady, if undistinguished, trade in which there was little threat of competition or hope of expansion, Joat let his sign fade. For decades the dwarf had concentrated his entrepreneurial efforts on procuring the strongest inebriants at the lowest possible price.
Tonight he was serving broy, a liquor produced when kank nectar was left to ferment in the sun for a few days, then sealed in resin-smeared leather sacks. Broy was a pungent, slightly rancid drink with a cloying sweetness that coated the drinker’s tongue for hours afterward. It was, to say the least, an acquired taste.
Unlike the liquors fermented from fruits or grains, broy produced quiet, melancholy drunks who stared at the stars, lost in introspection. As such, it was not the drink of choice at Joat’s Den, where templars came to forget who they were, what they did. But the templars who frequented Joat’s Den acquired taste and tolerance for whatever the old dwarf could scrounge, as long as it could kick like a broody erdlu.
Joat, himself, however, preferred the nights when broy was all he had behind the mekillot rib bar. Business was good, of course; it always was: when templars drank, they drank until they achieved oblivion. But when they drank broy, the furniture didn’t break and the place stayed quiet as a boneyard.
Usually.
Through some quirk of fate, from a stool beside the hearth that Joat had deliberately refused to kindle, a customer had taken it upon himself to entertain everyone. The dwarf stood ready to toss the human youth into the back alley the moment anyone complained, but the mournful tunes the boy played on a set of pipes whittled from the fragile wing-bones of unhatched erdlus suited the overall mood.
The youth was halfway handsome and dressed in plain, drab-colored clothes rather than a sulphurous yellow robe. He could have been anyone, but he was a templar. Joat was sure of that. He hadn’t hired any entertainment and though nontemplars occasionally came through his doors—his place had a certain reputation for discretion, if one didn’t mind the regular clientele—no nontemplar would be foolish enough to sit here, surrounded by the most reviled denizens of the city, lost in his thoughts and his